President Donald Trump has obliterated any notion of off-time for round-the-clock journalists, but it was still a relief to see that the alt-weeklies I read for this installment in my regular reading list were starting off the new year strong. The Chico News & Review, whose work I have previously highlighted here, can be forgiven, […]
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Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes: On Novelist Nettie Jones and the Madness of ‘Fish Tales’
Edited by Toni Morrison, the 1983 novel ‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones was supposed to set the literary world on fire. It didn’t.
Looking for Carolina Maria de Jesus
For a brief period in the 1960s, the Afro-Brazilian author of the memoir “Child of the Dark” was one of the most well-known writers in the world.
The Politics of UFOs
In the past few years the world of UFO “researchers” has been afflicted by the kinds of conspiratorial cracks that have appeared throughout American culture: Who can be trusted?
School for Girls
Years after recovering from anorexia, Jasmin Sandelson writes a letter to the high school friend she idolized, and explores how hunger, love, and envy shaped — and ended — their relationship.
‘I Don’t Think Those Feelings of Self-Doubt Ever Go Away.’
Susan Choi talks about feeling unsure of oneself, as a writer, as a performer — or as a victim — and about how her latest novel evolved in uncanny tandem with the real world.
Prayers to Lucia
When a high-risk pregnancy jeopardizes their eyesight, Heather Quinn explores the expectations of motherhood and finds common ground with a patron saint.
Filmmaker Barry Jenkins’ Adaptation of James Baldwin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk”
“I think when I found film,” he said, “I found a way — I still hide a bit — but a way to not hide as much. I felt like I could put these things into the work because it’s the movie. It’s not me.”
A History of American Protest Music: Come By Here
How cultural appropriation and erasure turned an African American spiritual into a white campfire sing-along.
‘I Inherited Luck’: Bridgett M. Davis on Her Family’s Life in the Numbers
In a new memoir, novelist Bridgett M. Davis reveals that her mother was a Numbers operator in Detroit from the 1960s through the 1980s.
